Coupling characteristics of a soft glass nematic liquid crystal photonic crystal fibre coupler

Abstract

This study presents the coupling characteristics of a novel soft glass photonic crystal fibre (PCF) coupler infiltrated with a nematic liquid crystal (NLC–PCF). The soft glass provides optical properties that cannot be obtained by silica such as high refractive index, high rare earth solubility and mid-infrared transmission. In addition, the nematic liquid crystal (NLC) offers high tunability with the temperature and external electric field, and increases the birefringence between the two fundamental polarised modes in the proposed coupler. Therefore the NLC–PCF coupler has stronger polarisation dependence than the low birefringence conventional silica PCF coupler. The effects of the coupler geometrical parameters, rotation angle of the director of the NLC and temperature on the coupler performance are investigated. The analysis is carried out using the full vectorial finite difference method and the beam propagation study is performed by the full vectorial finite difference beam propagation method. The numerical results reveal that the polarisation dependence of NLC–PCF coupler is approximately 2.5 times that of the conventional silica PCF coupler with shorter coupling length. In addition, the NLC–PCF coupler has strong potential to offer practical design for short polarisation splitter as well as multiplexer–demultiplexer.